A Hackneyed Meme for a Hackneyed Idea

There is nothing wrong, per se, with Willy Wonka, Kermit, and the Salad-Eating Cat. They’re classics. But they have been done to death…just like the statist argument the meme addresses.

No, for the love of crumbcake, this is not an argument to “elect better people.”

Nor is it an argument that if only we could have men like the American Founders in charge, everything would be fine.

John Adams was a genuine hero of the Revolution, and as soon as he got into power, he passed the Sedition Acts. Alexander Hamilton was a genuine hero of the Revolution, and he intentionally lied in the Federalist Papers to trick us into ditching the Articles of Confederation so he and his rich buddies could centralize power.

The Revolution was a good idea. The solution was not.

But Chris, without some sort of government, everything would be chaos.

Yes, if all you do is collapse a government without anything to replace it, then chaos is the likely outcome. But that is not what anarcho-libertarians are talking about.

Etymologically, the term “anarchy” just means “without rulers.” That does not have to mean “without rules.”

Anarchists—specifically market anarchists (a.k.a. anarcho-capitalists1)—are saying this:

Instead of a single entity claiming a monopoly to forcibly impose security and justice within a given territory and upon a captive people, private agencies can peacefully compete in a free and open market to provide security and justice to willing customers.

There is a broad body of literature on how this would work. But most of the time, the discussion never gets to interesting questions like…

How would the free-rider problem get solved?

or

How would the various legal practices of competing agencies be reconciled into a common law?

No. The discussion usually begins (and sadly often ends) with,

But Chris, without government, everything would be chaos.

The reason given?

Human beings are just too rotten for such a scenario. Order must be forcibly imposed.

I came across the anarchist counter-argument many times before I had a chance to think of it myself (in Rothbard, Hoppe, et al), but here it is, and I have not yet heard a good answer in reply:

Okay, so you say human beings are so rotten that the only way we can have order is to put some of us in charge of the rest.

But if we are so rotten, then anyone we put in charge will be rotten too, which means their governance will be rotten.

We don’t even need to resort to the further argument that power attracts the most rotten among us: the psychopaths and control freaks and people with weird agendas they want to impose on everyone else. That’s just the icing on the cake. The statist argument falls apart even without having to go there.

How could it not? Rotten people will build rotten institutions. If we are too rotten to function without authority, then any authority we allow, or to which we unwillingly submit, will be rotten.

A typical rebuttal is to claim that democratic mechanisms (voting), plus a variety of checks and balances built into the system, will somehow restrain the rotten people we’ve put in charge.

But here again, we have the rottenness problem:

If people are rotten, then voters are rotten. Voting just aggregates their rottenness into a single rotten decision. That decision then empowers a rotten person to impose other rotten ideas, by force, upon everyone else.

The other branches that are somehow holding those rotten officials in check are themselves run by other rotten officials. And those rotten officials also have the ability to impose their rottenness on the rest of us by force.

And all of those branches are part of a single government that aggregates a bunch of rotten leaders with rotten agendas into a single rotten entity whose power and authority no one is allowed to refuse.

Tragically, the argument never even makes it this far. In most cases, the person arguing for the necessity of the state—who had never even heard of actual anarcho-libertarian ideas until five seconds earlier—is absolutely convinced, without a moment’s research or contemplation, that those ideas cannot possibly work. But let’s continue anyway.

The likely replies here are either:

• A) Somehow, rottenness is restrained through some sort of aggregation of the collective wisdom of ‘we, the people,’ or
• B) Maybe we’re not that rotten after all.

If B, then of course the rottenness argument has been conceded. So let’s start with A.

Argument A is a possibility. We can imagine that people are on some sort of moral bell curve, with a normal distribution:

• A smaller number of rotten people to one edge of the bell (with a tiny number of absolute monsters),
• A smaller number of wonderful people to the other side of the bell (with a tiny number of genuine angels).
• And a much larger number of morally okay people in the big middle of the bell.

So what we have in argument A is the claim that the aggregation of everyone averages things out to a moral okayness.

Here too, the rottenness argument has basically been conceded. We’re no longer claiming that everyone is rotten; we are claiming that the rottenness of some is restrained as part of an emergent process that aggregates the decisions, opinions, and morality of the whole of humanity.

So let’s see, where have we seen that phenomenon before? Hmm. Could it be…

THE MARKET?

The market is the ultimate emergent-order phenomenon. The market is not centrally controlled. It is the aggregation of millions of human beings making decisions that are in their own best interest.

So, if…

• 1. Human morality occupies a normal distribution (rather than all of us being exclusively and fundamentally rotten), and
• 2. The aggregation, via emergent processes, of human morality can produce a good order,

Then what the heck do we need government for?

We trust the market to give us shoes and cars and haircuts and everything else far more than we trust the government to provide these things. In fact, the only people who still believe that government could do a better job are college professors and dead communists.

So why do we believe that the market is incapable of providing security and justice, when it is so much better at providing everything else?

You’re gonna have to come up with a better answer than Because people are rotten.

1
Anarcho-capitalist (ancap) is the most common term of art here. But it is problematic, for reasons we will have to discuss at a later time.